The article points out that many protests in the U.S. went smoothly through the practice of police and protest organizers meeting and jointly managing protests, but that this practice fell into disuse after the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting in which protesters violated the negotiated terms and police responded with violence.
While some recent (and ongoing) protests have turned violent, many didn't. In the coming months we'll have time to do a postmortem. I strongly suspect spontaneous protests without organization will be found to have the most potential for violence, while those with organizers committed to self-policing and, ideally, cooperating with police will be found to have fared much better.
Individual people may be intelligent and responsible, but crowds have their own rules of behaviour and need to be managed. Protests are more dangerous when unplanned or when their organizers give no thought to self-policing.
There will always be organizers who want violence because it reliably brings press coverage and attention to their protests, but social media is also creating new problems. Coordinating a large number of people to show up at the same time and place used to take considerable planning and effort. When you have to work hard just to get the even to happen, why wouldn't you plan how it will unfold as well? Now a couple of tweets or posts on the right reddit subs will suffice. How can police meet with the organizer of a protest when it's really just some dude who had a lot of social media followers and might not even bother showing up himself?
These are complex situations that don't follow rules. The mob consists of peaceful protesters, violent protesters and looters. people's membership in any of these groups can be multiple and shift over time.
it's not reasonable for police to make an assessment who is who on the ground because their job is not to be a jury. what is reasonable is that once a gathering crosses the threshold of criminal activity it becomes illegal.
one solution is to just arrest everybody after giving them time to disperse. but to do that you need overwhelming numbers. not always the resources to do that.
you can't just stand there and let people beat you, stab you, lob projectiles at you. you have to respond to that force with force. You also need to protect property again using force.
again unless you have overwhelming numbers you can't engage in hand-to-hand combat or using battons. this strategy cannot be used by itself to bring the crowd under control. so each officer needs a force multiplier some sort of tool that can effect multiple people. it's a given that in such situations any such tool will affect multiple people even those doing nothing violent.
tear gas and rubber bullets are okay tools. but I think there needs to be more. when a patient becomes psychotic and dangerous in a hospital or asylum you don't mace their face. you give them a sedative. instead of CS gas it would be great if there was some sort of sedative gas to just slow people down enough to sap their will to continue.
police have to handle the situations as best they can using the tools they have.
I don't think you can say that big protests are all about the death of one man or the treatment of one group. I think the causes of people's unhappiness here is systemic and this is probably just an outlet where people feel now we can stand up.
the police can't cure the people of their anger no matter what they do.
when I see this chaos, I remember ahow US media lionized what happened in Hong Kong not even 1 year ago, and I can't help thinking of the proverb, people in glass houses....
However, mayors or governors could. Tell AGs to have compulsory investigations of all policce shootings. Charge police officers who don't report corruption or violence with conspiracy charges. Bust police unions which arehelping criminal cops and charge them under RICO statutes.
Actually, what I was trying to say, and I did not say clearly...was I don't think the anger that is driving this unrest is only a result of police violence.
I think it's a lot of anger from multiple causes, economic, the lockdown, and so on. That's why I said, no matter what police do, they cannot cure that.
Hopefully I made it clear now.